SATA Problem, need help! :p

[tscolari]

Hi...
Ive gentoo installed here for a long time, and im having a hardware problem (almost sure)...

Ok, ive a 120GB seagate sata disk where my linux system, with some partitions, is, and a plus partition where i have windows on it.
Also ive a samsung 80gb normal IDE disk.

this is what is happening, today morning, from work with ssh here, mounted all my linux partitions on a dir (after formatting them) and unpacked an stage5 ive done yesterday which i was using for some time in a "test" partition...
all gone ok, noticed no problem at all... now when i got home, ive restarted the computer for see the 'new' install and got a grub error 17. Toght it could be some grub missconfiguration, so i booted from the livecd to chroot and change, but then when i tryed to mount any partition on the sda disk i got this message:

Code: Select all

mount: /dev/sda1 already mounted or  /gentoo busy

this was happening to all partitions!
did a fdisk in /dev/sda all was normal...

so i tryed windows boot cd to check too... if i unplug the IDE driver, the windows cd simply doesnt boot, stays forever reading the disk, with the IDE disk it boots, is able to format the sda partition, copy the files, but at the boot time, no gaim...

Im a little disperated, anyidea what could fix this? Is this a disk problem, mother board problem? did anyone got trough this?

help please


note:
Ive done fsck in the partitions and all seem to be ok, it counts files, directories, and report no corruption...
are there a general disk check program i could use to try fix this?

[tscolari]

i tryed hdparm it, but any attemp i try i got a "inappropriated ioctl for device" error...

[tscolari]

none?

[skyl3r]

tscolari,
same here, i have been using gentoo for a looong time. I am having the same issue.
I think we are missing something, the hardware cannot be damaged. I am wondering if there should be another device that we should be accessing, not /dev/sda or /dev/sdb
in my case i have two 80GB hard drives, set up with hardware RAID mirroring... i wonder if that device should have its own /dev entry and i should be accessing that. i say this because i accessed sda directly and created a partition table, however i checked sdb some minutes later and it hadnt mirrored it....
and no matter how hard i try i still get the same errors when i try to turn swap on or when i try to mount one of the partitions....

[tscolari]

hmm
im not alone so

i guess we are missing something too, because its very strange, be able to see partition table, format, even when i did a fsck i could saw all the files inside it...
just dont make sense it not mount... =/

I downloaded a seagate disk tools to see if it notice something, but i dont have many hopes...
can this be a controler problem maybe?

[riven]

What controller are you using? Because anything using the Sil3112 chipset is bad news!

[tscolari]

What controller are you using? Because anything using the Sil3112 chipset is bad news!

hmm mine is Sil 3114, thats bad too?

my motherboard is a dfi lanparty nf4 ultrad

[roki942]

Got a Sil3112 on mine also. Tried Grub when I first installed Gentoo and could not get it to recognize the partitions and boot no matter what I tried. Tried LILO instead and it boots without a problem.

[tscolari]

hmm

i was able to boot from it just some time ago...
but i dont know exactly what i did... anyway i first installed a base and fast stage3 gentoo on the ide, and them i was able to mount the patitions from there ... no sens at all (even because i aways have been able to do this direct from the livecd)...

so i asked grub to boot there, and it worked a bit, loaded kernel, framebuffer, but gave a kernel panic telling it wasnt able to find init. it was something like this:

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ReiserFS: sda2: ...
...
VFS: Mounted Root (Reiserfs Filesystem)
Freeing unused kernel memory: 196K freed
Kernel Panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel

I was supposed to work, since sda2 was the / partition...


Anyway, ive reformated to reinstall on it, but livecd still not mounting them... if i do mount -f it mounts, but all partition have 506M of size ... does this say anything?

If someone can help...


also i have tested the sata hd in other computer and it seem to be normal, windows could see partitions and write/get data from them... Also ive runned seagate tools to see if there was something wrong with it and it passed all tests... Can i presume this is a mother board problem? Is this a case for RMA?